Question

I need to locate a fast, lightweight expression parser.

Ideally I want to pass it a list of name/value pairs (e.g. variables) and a string containing the expression to evaluate. All I need back from it is a true/false value.

The types of expressions should be along the lines of:

varA == "xyz" and varB==123

Basically, just a simple logic engine whose expression is provided at runtime.

UPDATE
At minimum it needs to support ==, !=, >, >=, <, <=

Regarding speed, I expect roughly 5 expressions to be executed per request. We’ll see somewhere in the vicinity of 100/requests a second. Our current pages tend to execute in under 50ms. Usually there will only be 2 or 3 variables involved in any expression. However, I’ll need to load approximately 30 into the parser prior to execution.

UPDATE 2012/11/5
Update about performance. We implemented nCalc nearly 2 years ago. Since then we’ve expanded it’s use such that we average 40+ expressions covering 300+ variables on post backs. There are now thousands of post backs occurring per second with absolutely zero performance degradation.

We’ve also extended it to include a handful of additional functions, again with no performance loss. In short, nCalc met all of our needs and exceeded our expectations.

Answer 1

Have you seen https://ncalc.codeplex.com/ and https://github.com/sheetsync/NCalc ?

It’s extensible, fast (e.g. has its own cache) enables you to provide custom functions and varaibles at run time by handling EvaluateFunction/EvaluateParameter events. Example expressions it can parse:

Expression e = new Expression("Round(Pow(Pi, 2) + Pow([Pi2], 2) + X, 2)");

  e.Parameters["Pi2"] = new Expression("Pi * Pi");
  e.Parameters["X"] = 10;

  e.EvaluateParameter += delegate(string name, ParameterArgs args)
    {
      if (name == "Pi")
      args.Result = 3.14;
    };

  Debug.Assert(117.07 == e.Evaluate());

It also handles unicode & many data type natively. It comes with an antler file if you want to change the grammer. There is also a fork which supports MEF to load new functions.

It also supports logical operators, date/time’s strings and if statements.